


A Long Night

by bluestbluetoeverblue



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 07:21:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17524322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluestbluetoeverblue/pseuds/bluestbluetoeverblue
Summary: Bucky resigned himself to the fact that Steve could never love him a long time ago. That doesn't make it any easier.





	A Long Night

The night is dark and heavy. The humidity clings to the tactical suit as he moves like a glitch, behind a treeline in one second, beside the house in another, then inside without having taken any tangible steps. There are no lights on. He listens and hears only the sound of the katydids in the bushes outside. He moves and is in the bedroom. The sleeping man’s eyes blink open just as the knife touches his throat. There is no time to scream. He moves to the other side of the bed and repeats the action on a different neck. The mission has been fulfilled. He turns and finds a small shadow in the doorway. The child is frozen in fear, eyes caught on the bodies in the bed. No witnesses, the soldier thinks, gripping his knife.

Bucky’s eyes open, and it takes a moment for the softness of the bed beneath him to register. He looks around the room, his eyes quickly adjusting to the darkness. It doesn’t take him so long to remember where he is. He pushes his hair out of his face, forehead damp with sweat. He breathes, chest rising slowly and deliberately. He can still feel the humidity on his skin, can still smell the blood.

He gets out of bed and walks through the compound without making a sound. The door is already cracked with a sliver of light coming into the hall. Bucky pushes it open. Steve sits at his desk, soft lamplight falling around him. He turns when Bucky enters. Bucky sits on the edge of the bed and rolls his shoulder absentmindedly.

“You want to talk about it?” Steve asks. Bucky shakes his head, so Steve leans back in the desk chair and watches him.

The room is more sparse than the other sleeping quarters. There are a few things pinned to the walls and stacks of books beside the desk, but most of the items in the room are not personal.

“Where are your paints?” Bucky asks.

Steve looks at him with some surprise, the corners of his mouth pulling up.

“Paints?” he asks. Bucky hesitates.

“You’re...you’re an artist. Your room was always lined with paint jars. Wasn’t it?”

Steve swivels around in the chair and pulls open the top desk drawer. He hands a notebook with a blue cover to Bucky and sits on the bed beside him. “I haven’t felt like painting much,” Steve says as Bucky opens the sketchbook. The pages are varied in subject, from still lifes to a scene in a park that seems to breathe with movement. Bucky shakes his head as he flips through the book. He had always been speechless looking at Steve’s drawings. He had real talent. It was the reason Bucky had helped scrounge up enough for some art classes before they got too expensive. And before they went to war.

He flips to the center of the book and finds lines so heavy that they smear onto the paper in spots. The shading is deep, the sketches monochromatic. More than a few pages show him from the highway, when he wasn’t in his own head. They are all made of harsh lines, whether it is his whole body, his maskless face, or his arm. Opposite of one of the drawings, Bucky is shocked to find a different version of his face staring back at him. A younger him with short hair and stubble on his chin, a grin on his face. The lines are less sure, the jaw slightly off.

“I’m not so good at drawing from memory,” Steve says.

Bucky closes the sketchbook and wonders at his ability to create tension. Steve shifts his weight, eyes on the floor. He has been drawing Bucky for years. Whenever Bucky was bored enough, Steve would convince him to sit still as a reference. The truth was, Bucky liked seeing the way Steve’s pencil showed him. There used to be pages and pages of them, but now it feels like Bucky has stumbled on something immensely private.

“I should probably try to get some sleep,” Bucky says as Steve tucks the notebook back into the desk.

“You could stay here if you want,” Steve says. “It’d be like the old days.”

Bucky nods. The last thing he wants to do is go back to that empty room. He knows he won’t be able to sleep anymore, not after that dream, but he gets into the bed anyways and closes his eyes. He thinks Steve might stay up all night, but he hears the lamp being switched off after a while and feels the mattress shift under Steve’s weight.

Bucky holds his breath. Every cell in his body is nervous, even after Steve’s breathing slows. He never had any trouble falling asleep, even crammed into a foxhole. They have been sharing a bed since they were twelve, when Bucky would sleep over and Sarah would catch them sitting up under the blankets whispering and laughing. When they first moved into that one bedroom, they had barely any furniture to their names, so they shared the twin mattress like when they were kids. Bucky kept waiting for Steve to say something, to buy a second bed, but he never did. Probably because Bucky’s body heat was the only thing that kept him alive that first frozen January.

Whatever the reason, Bucky was grateful. At least at night when Steve curled towards him, shivering, Bucky could move closer and pretend that everything he was feeling was normal. Now, in a warm bed decades later, he doesn’t dare move an inch.

He is still staring at the ceiling hours later when Steve begins to stir. The sky is still black outside the window, but Bucky can see the pain crossing Steve’s face. Almost as soon as it starts, it is over and Steve’s eyes flick open. He takes a gasping breath. Bucky watches him sit up, eyes closed, hair falling over his forehead. Bucky rests a hand on his shoulder, and Steve looks at him.

“Want to talk about it?” Bucky asks.

Steve looks at him for a moment, blue eyes bright in the darkness. Something crosses his face. Indecision, maybe. “No,” he says with a hint of defeat. He runs a hand through his hair. The motion brings an image to Bucky’s mind. A day at the beach. Burning sand, cool water, sunlight glinting in Steve’s hair.

He feels like himself now, most of the time. Maybe not the person he used to be, but more like he knows who he was at least. Still, sometimes a new memory will come through and surprise him. They’re usually nothing too big. Just moments he had forgotten.

Bucky isn’t sure how long they sit in silence. His arm whirrs quietly, the noise filling the room. Steve reaches to turn on a light and gets out of bed. They have both resigned themselves to a sleepless night, apparently. Bucky suddenly feels like an intruder in the room.

“Can I ask you something?” he says.

“Of course, Buck.” Steve’s voice is tired but warm. Reassuring.

“How did we meet?”

Steve smiles like he was expecting something worse. He thinks for a second.

“We...well…” His brow furrows, and he laughs. “I don’t actually remember.”

“That’s a change,” Bucky says with a smile.

“We’ve been pals for as long as I can remember. It’s always been you and me. Ma used to say that we were joined at the hip.”

Bucky runs his hand over the space on the bed in front of him. The blanket isn’t quite soft, but it keeps the warmth in. He looks at his left hand. It has always seemed more solid than the rest of him.

“Everything is so different now,” Bucky says, “but I still feel so…”

“Scared,” Steve finishes, almost to himself. He leans against the window, eyes on the ground.

“What does Captain America have to be scared about?” It is supposed to be a joke, but it comes out accusatory. Steve looks at him, his mouth forming a hard line. The face is familiar, and Bucky can feel the beginnings of a fight they’ve had before. Standing in more than one operating base, Bucky mad as hell no matter how many times Steve proves that he was made for the battlefield.

“Why did you have to take that serum?” Bucky says it quietly, but he can hear the anger in his own voice. He doesn’t know how to get rid of it. Maybe he doesn’t really want to. There is something comforting about fighting with Steve, that stubborn look falling over his face like always. But there is something new there. It takes Bucky a second to recognize it.

“You don’t have to tell me that this is my fault, Buck. I know.” His voice is a strange mix of anger and grief. “I left you on that mountain. I let go. I should have known. I should have—”

Steve closes his eyes, jaw clenched, and Bucky stands.

“Steve.” He steps over to him, but Steve just keeps shaking his head. “Steve.” He puts his hands on his shoulders. Steve looks at him.

“That’s not what I meant,” Bucky says. “I should be dead. That fall should have killed me. There’s no way you could have known.” 

He presses his thumbs into Steve’s shoulders with each word, trying to make him accept the truth. Bucky steps backwards to sit on the edge of the bed. He wrings his hands together for a second, trying to find the words.

“I just wish things were like they used to be. Before all of this. When it was simple.”

It was never simple, not for Bucky. It was always confusing and terrifying, but at least he had Steve. And he knew how to protect him. That much was easy enough.

“Was it ever simple, really?” Steve asks, echoing Bucky’s thought. Bucky watches him and can see that he is upset again. His face is conflicted, blue eyes troubled. It feels like they are a million miles from who they were in Brooklyn all those years ago, but somehow Steve bites his lip and still looks like the same skinny kid Bucky has been watching his whole life. Pretending he didn’t feel the way he did about him.

“When I first woke up,” Steve says in a quiet voice, “everything I knew was gone. But I thought there were some things that were good—better than before. I mean, how many people get to see the future, to live in it? But even though things were different, it didn’t matter at all. Not when you were still gone.”

“What do you mean?” Bucky can’t follow his train of thought, a familiar sense of confusion setting in. Steve has been speaking almost to himself this whole time, but he looks up at Bucky’s words. Bucky waits for a response, but Steve just steps forward, closing the distance between them.

The kiss startles Bucky. He doesn’t know what to do and has barely registered the moment before it is over. Steve pulls away, eyes wide. Bucky feels a deep blush spreading across his chest. No words come out of his mouth, probably because his brain is busy doing somersaults.

“I’m sorry, I—I just had to see.” Steve sounds breathless as he stands there, face guarded.

“How long?” Bucky isn’t sure where the question comes from. Steve’s eyes are wild for a second before gets the nerve to answer.

“For—for as long as I can remember. When we were kids. When I found you on that table. On the helicarrier.” He wrings his hands together, the way he used to when he was trying to think about the next move during the war. “Till the end of the line,” he adds, like an explanation.

Bucky can’t do anything but look at him, blue eyes on blue.

“Say something, Buck. Please.”

When he first got back to camp after marching from Austria on bleeding feet, Bucky was dead exhausted and half delirious. He spent two days in a med tent drifting in and out of consciousness. Whenever that blond hair appeared above him, a halo over a body too big for his memory, Bucky was sure that it was just another one of Zola’s tricks. He was semi-awake one night, mumbling incoherently and not quite aware of anything except the sores on his feet. He heard the bed creak as Steve sat beside him on the tiny cot. Steve didn’t say anything. He just sat there for the rest of the night, holding Bucky’s hand firmly in his.

“I love you.” It comes out like the confession it has always been.

Steve smiles. They are sitting side by side now, shoulders almost touching, and Bucky leans over with some uncertainty. Steve just smiles bigger, one hand resting on Bucky’s leg. Bucky has spent years imagining this, playing it over and over in his head whenever the mere thought didn’t rack him with guilt. But this kiss is something he could never have imagined, not like this in this room, both of them who they are now. They stare at each other for a long time afterwards, and Bucky feels like he is seeing Steve for the first time.

“What now?” Just as Bucky asks the question, a yawn overcomes him. He can feel the skin beneath his eyes pulling downward, darkening every second. The one time he wants to be awake and suddenly he is dizzy with sleep.

Steve gives a soft smile. “Come on,” he says, stretching out on the bed, “the sun will be up soon.” Bucky lies down, a new sort of nervousness filling him. He has done this a million times, yet it is foreign territory. They lie shoulder to shoulder, but Steve pushes closer until they are overlapping a little, sharing the same space. Bucky takes a breath and lets his metal arm rest on top of him, turns until his head is beside Steve’s.

“I can’t believe I wasted all that time being afraid,” Bucky whispers.

Steve pushes closer, already beginning to nod off. Bucky smiles and closes his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, lovelies!   
> [Buy me a coffee if you enjoyed it?](https://ko-fi.com/L4L4WBXK#)


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